ABSTRACT
Mapping benthic habitats in a coral reef ecosystem has long been the research focus in coastal remote sensing. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in partnership with many other entities, has made decades of effort to map habitats in the Florida Ree. This chapter discusses the spaceborne Earth Observing (EO)-1/Hyperion sensor was assessed for reef habitat mapping with an aim to looking into the potential of spaceborne hyperspectral sensors for reef habitat mapping in the Florida Keys. It presents a spaceborne hyperspectral sensor, EO-1/Hyperion, was assessed to map benthic habitats in the Florida Keys. Object-based image analysis and machine learning classifiers were combined to generate accurate and informative reef benthic habitat maps. Reef habitat mapping in the Florida Reef Tract is mainly from manual interpretation of fine spatial resolution aerial photography or Ikonos-type satellite data. The EO-1/Hyperion products were georeferenced, but for the selected study area, a big misalignment was observed between the Hyperion and Ikonos images.
